Are Creative on crack?

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mrk

mrk

mrk

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The last 2 driver updates for the XFI I have noticed an increase in volume level resulting in increased distortion meaning I have to lower the master volume in Windows (Vista32) in order to not get distortion.

The distortion is only on the left channel on quick low frequencies and is completely gone now at a master volume of 65. Before it used to be 80 and before that around 90.

Why are Creative doing this? I don't know if other people notice this but I certainly do through amp & speakers/cans and I guess the increased volume level by default is why many folks report "better" sound quality when in fact it's just increased in loudness. Not saying sound quality is crap becaus eit's certainly not but these little bugs on each driver "Update" is a bit tedious now.

I need XFi for gaming too else I'd be on a Xonar D2/x.

Master @ 60 for me I suppose from now on...
 
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i've noticed this too tbh, i thought it was a badly encoded mp3, not had time to test..

-could well be a bad mp3 in this case though :p
 
I've often had problems with MP3 playback, particularly the level of distortion from my X-Fi in iTunes. With winamp the playback is fine. Weird.
 
What's the score here? I used to always use Creative products in my builds but was out of the scene for a while and come back to this. All I read now is how bad the drivers are. What's this Asus chap like?

I had issues using my X-fi with Vista when it first came out not even sure if they've fixed that.
 
I am about to revert back to the previous drivers.

Half my Trance Mixes have gone to pot. The sound levels are terrible. For some reason, the sound levels keep dropping and increasing. If I increase the windows volume level, I get no problem but I then have to turn the volume down on the sub.
 
Pretty sure TF2/HL2 and all other Source-based games don't have any form of hardware accelerated 3D sound support, so there's no benefit there.
 
The difference is there during gaming in gaming mode on the xfi whether it's positional or not, the creative just does it better positioning sounds in their correct directions. When I had the HDA Xplosion with burr brown opamps the musical quality blew the XFI away but I returned it because the gaming experience even in games that didn't have any 3d sound options was significantly worse.
 
mrk said:
The difference is there during gaming in gaming mode on the xfi whether it's positional or not, the creative just does it better positioning sounds in their correct directions. When I had the HDA Xplosion with burr brown opamps the musical quality blew the XFI away but I returned it because the gaming experience even in games that didn't have any 3d sound options was significantly worse.
Click to expand...

Good stuff, I must say I found it very had to move away from my x-fi initially as I'd used one for years and got so use to the sound style that everything else sounded weird.
 
Fudging ******!

I wondered why I was getting some left channel distortion today (headphones and speakers) and it seems the distortion goes away at master windows volume 45.

The other day I had to drop to 50 because of the same reason and now 45...

ARGH These drivers have progressively started killing my card :|


Xonar D2x methinks...
 
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